So the conference! I was in Boston for the Airline Passenger Experience Expo. The two main purposes of this conference is so airlines can shop around for the latest In-Flight Entertainment systems and content (think movies and TV-shows). Panasonic, Thales, and Zodiac were all showing off their latest things. Also, ALL of the major, minor, and international studios were there (think HBO, Disney, Universal, etc).

The other portion of the conference related to catering… think what could airlines do to improve their catering and align it with what passengers want. They mainly focused on frequent flyers and prying into their brains to predict what the market wants.

The keynote speaker was American Airlines’ CEO. They asked him questions on why seats and lavatories were getting smaller or more dense… and he responded with something along the lines of, “well, it makes mo money, and people aren’t going to stop flying, so why wouldn’t we?”

^Honesty!

There were a bunch of other CEO’s there, but one that stood out was LATAM’s CEO, Claudia Sender, who basically called out the industry of being too white, and male.

So the showroom had all the booths… What’s that box in the middle of their booth?

A SMART GALLEY?! the next big thing is ordering food from your seat, so you never have to have any human interaction! This is

^This is what we want, right?

At the catering portion of the conference, basically all the major food companies were doing demos and giving out samples to airline catering decision makers. I wish I brought my duffel bag, so I would still be living off of the free samples…

Sous vide is apparently the next big thing for business and first class catering. Catering kitchens can pre-cook a lot of things, that would heat up well on galley equipment

Also, there were a lot of bakeries selling parbaked things, that could be finished in galley ovens.

They also were hawking their dishes! I wouldn’t mind some of this at home…

In summary, this was a pretty awesome conference to attend. Despite working on galleys for the past eight years, I didn’t really know how the industry worked, and this allowed me to learn a lot! Also, Boston is rad!